such good luck

“I daresay it’s just a scratch,” Matthew said. Nine times out of ten, nine surgeons out of ten, he’d have been clapped on his left shoulder and grinned at with a bluff exclamation along the lines of “Good man” or “Just so, just so, jolly right you are” and given a bit of a lift out of the bed to leave it empty for some poor duffer who mightn’t last the night but deserved to die between what passed for clean sheets.

“What medical college did you train at, then?” Dr. Foster, the gruffest, most sardonic American Matthew had ever had the misfortune to come across (or a cropper), said. “The laceration was clean enough but went down to the bone, far too close to the critical blood supply. I dug out shrapnel for a half-hour. Or perhaps you British don’t worry overmuch about sepsis? Gangrene?”

Matthew blanched, more at the tone when the man, dark-eyed, bearded like a pirate or a Frenchman, said the word gangrene. There was the sweet scent of decay in his voice, the revulsion at a life that would dwindle and then go out like a candle losing the air.

“I thought so,” Dr. Foster said, pulling a battered silver flask from his pocket. “I know you prefer tea, but it’s in short supply and you could do with a little aqua vita. Water of life, eh?”

The spirits were far smoother than Matthew had any right to expect. The flask was monogrammed, JTF. The ward was full and yet it felt like they were as close to being alone as two men could be in this blasted War. He handed the flask back and watched the man’s hand tighten on it as he tucked it away.

“John? Or Joseph?” Matthew asked.

“You underestimate the colonies. Or at least my benighted family,” Dr. Foster said. “Jedediah. It means ‘friend of God’ and a greater misnomer there never was, I assure you.”

“Is that a comment on your piety or the War?” Matthew said. The surgeon laughed.

“Both, I suppose,” he said.

“Perhaps I might impose upon you a little,” Matthew said.

“Ask and ye may receive,” Dr. Foster replied.

“A pencil. I have a letter to write and no way to write it,” Matthew said. “A pen is too much to hope for.”

“Here,” Foster said, handing over a stubby pencil from the same pocket where the flask was kept close. “You’re left-handed?”

“No, but I manage. I’ve a horror of giving dictation,” Matthew said.

“That’s what you’ve a horror of?” Foster said. “How long have you been on the front?”

“Long enough,” Matthew said. Were the days counted in minutes or lives? In gas or bayonets or cannon? In birds who no longer flew through the fields, in what remained of trees. In stars that were far too beautiful over No Man’s Land?

“Who’s the letter to? Your wife? Or your mother?”

“Neither,” Matthew said.

“You care about her though,” Foster said. “If you’d write her tonight.”

“Her name is Mary,” Matthew said. What did it matter? He’d never see the man again and it was a curious pleasure to say her name aloud, to conjure her dark eyes, that lift of her chin, the raven’s wing of her hair against her cheek. Her hand in his, just for a moment, the only moment that he remembered when he woke.

“Mine too,” Foster said. “Though she might argue my claim to possession. In fact, I know she would.”

“Perhaps you’d be surprised. Perhaps she’d be glad to know you speak of her,” Matthew said.

“Would your Mary?” Foster countered.

“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve never understood her. I only care,” Matthew said.

“Care?”

“Very much,” Matthew answered. Foster nodded sharply, his gaze abstracted. Matthew wondered for a moment about Foster’s Mary, but something about the way the man stood there, utterly still except for the one hand that trembled before he made it into a fist, kept him from asking any questions.

“It’s something to be able to say that,” Foster remarked. “Even to a stranger.”

“I supposed you were my doctor, not a stranger,” Matthew said. “I supposed that meant you were used to hearing secrets.”

“And keeping them,” Foster said, pausing before he added. “Find a way, Crawley.”

“I beg your pardon, Captain Foster?”

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